Poet and classics scholar Michael Broder presented his work at a panel discussion on “Poetic Responses to AIDS” at AWP Chicago last week. He has kindly given me permission to reprint one of those poems below.
The Remembered One
The good die young, but sometimes
they come back, dripping with something
we can’t name or identify,
an acrid perfume, or they reach for us
like a taproot, draining
our sweet wells of oblivion
until we lie drenched in a common sweat,
our bed sheet their burial shroud, their moldering crust.
I dreamt of Marcos last night.
I thought he came to be buried,
to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:
Why should you get the house,
the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
I can crawl the night too, you know, the night is crawling
with me, with mine, with ours—
us—
while you pretend to walk, awake, alive.
Come with me, why don’t you, make once and for all
the descent you practiced so ably for so many years.
I know a place with many darkened corners
where you can crawl on hands and knees
like in the old days—
What’s that you called it? “the old ich-du…”
We are beautiful there, and legion.
We will keep you busy for centuries.
And think what precious memories he will have,
here above—
This is the song you have waited so long to sing, isn’t it?
****
Michael Broder holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring. His book manuscript, This Life Now, is awaiting a publisher. Visit www.mbroder.com for links to online publication. Michael can be contacted at mb*****@*****er.com .
Category Archives: Great Poems Online
The Poet Spiel: “the end”
the end
i don’t think
anyone cried
on the first day
but
there was loud silence
around
the kitchen table
dad phoned
the wheat-threshers
told them
there would be
no filthy sweat work
one out-of-hell
sweep of hail
had wasted his readied crop
one day too soon
no one wanted to talk
so i hid my mouth upstairs
just played and played my harry belafonte
till it numbed me dead
when i came to
my dumbed diamond needle
was banging
deep grooves in my head
my folks were still
in the kitchen
staring
at dark
the dogs were scratching
our screendoor
and i wasn’t sure if
the cows had been milked
my dad had to quit
a lifetime
dedicated
to farming
and we had to move
where our only harvest
was just a dumb little patch
of green grass where i rooted
a pussy willow cutting
hoping it might spring up
to cast cover over
the naked bathroom window
of a little white house
crammed between
everybody-strangers
who did not have trucks
who made their lights
push through
my bedroom walls
after bedtime
and me just listening
to the slick-black street
where a kid could not
kick dirt
This poem was reprinted by permission from The Poet Spiel’s chapbook once upon a farmboy (Madman Ink, 2008). Visit his website here.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Excerpt from “The Book of Pilgrimage”
Poet Lois P. Jones, whose “Milonga for a Blind Man” I reprinted here earlier this month, was inspired by my “Mu!” post to send me this Rilke poem. In the spirit of hermeneutic indeterminacy that we pride ourselves on here at Reiter’s Block, I’m sharing both of the translations that she found. The first, which I like better, is courtesy of The Old Bill blog (I’ve queried him for its source), and the second is from the Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Books, New York).
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version one)
All will come into its strength again;
the seas will rage, the field will be undivided,
the trees will tower and the walls will be small,
and in the valleys, nomads and farmers as strong and varied
as the land itself.
No churches to encircle God as though
he were a fugitive, and then bewail him
as if he were a captured, wounded creature.
Houses will welcome all who knock,
a sense of boundless sacrifice will prevail
in all actions, and in you and me.
No more waiting for the Beyond, no longing for it,
no belittling, even of death,
we shall long for what belongs to us,
learn the earth,
serve its ends,
and feel its hands about us like a friend’s.
****
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version two)
All will come into its strength;
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearing for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us,
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
Ellen LaFleche: “Truth in the Booth”
Northampton Poet Laureate Leslea Newman organized an Inauguration Day poetry reading this past Tuesday, which you can read about on the MassLive website. My friend Ellen LaFleche has given me permission to reprint her poem from the event, in which she revisits an episode in America’s civil rights history that deserves greater public awareness.
Truth in the Booth
I:
Inauguration, 1913:
Eight Thousand Women Disrupt the Festivities by Demanding the Right to Suffrage
The women who wanted to vote
picketed Woodrow’s big
white house. Woodrow and his Senators
said no, and no again,
though every day on horseback
Woodrow politely tipped his hat
at that gaggle of girls who wanted to vote.
The women marched. Year after year
they picketed,
thick skirts scraping the dirt,
corsets pressing their ribs like murdering fingers.
Until a world war loomed.
Woodrow had a dead arch-duke on his hands.
Soldiers choking on mustard gas.
He lost patience with the women
who wanted to vote.
Woodrow sent them to prison.
The women were manacled at the ankles,
hands bound behind their backs like a procession of witches.
You know the story:
rats, the damp, the dungeon blackness.
Each woman alone in her cell.
Putrid food, water scummy with typhus.
One of the women began to knock. Alice Paul.
The knocking spread, cell wall to cell wall,
fists scraping against brick,
women raising their voices with their fists.
The women went on strike.
For weeks they starved.
Their hips sank. Their tongues rumbled with hunger
in their skulls.
Then, the forced feeding. The tube down the throat.
The warden poured in nutrients until the women choked.
They gagged like the mustard-gassed soldiers.
Still they knocked,
hands fisted, bloody knuckles
insisting on justice.
The women knocked. They starved.
They knocked. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Still, Woodrow and his Senators said no to the vote.
Women who wanted to vote
started a fire in a cremation urn,
a kind of perpetual White House flame.
When Woodrow gave a speech,
the women burned his words to ash.
The women starved. They knocked. They burned
Woodrow’s words. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Until seven years after Inauguration,
Woodrow and his Senators
said yes to suffrage.
II:
Election Day, 2008.
I speak my truth in the booth.
One woman, one vote for Obama.
This vote is for the women who hungered,
for the women who burned Woodrow’s words,
for the women who suffered for suffrage.
This vote for Barack
is for the women who starved themselves,
for the women who knocked and knocked and knocked.
Lois P. Jones: “Milonga for a Blind Man”
The always-pleasing literary e-zine The Rose and Thorn has just released its Winter issue, which includes cover art by Gustav Klimt and fine poetry and prose by Jason Mccall, Linda Leschak, Michael T. Smith and many others. Lois P. Jones has given me permission to reprint her wonderful poem from the issue below. A milonga is a style of South American dance.
Milonga for a Blind Man
Time is both loss and memory.
—Jorge Luis Borges
In the middle of the night
a man takes a key
from his pocket.
In the middle of the night
he climbs to the top of the stairs.
From his balcony he remembers daylight,
the crumbled cement and the cracks
on the tavern below. The way the sky spoke
to him, the last one with anything to say.
And the opening of the flowers
when they would open for him.
Pink or coral, her lips staining
his with a memory – a breath
and a daydream of pampas and hibiscus.
His shirt buttoned down to the waist
and the white skin of a butterfly.
In the middle of the night
he remembers a snow heart
and the red walls of morning
where he walked the streets
in search of distance. Someone
has counted his days
before he was born. And this blindness
that followed plucked out his eyes
to sleep. It always comes to this –
edges fading from the familiar,
a city vague and celestial. He has lost
count of all his endings.
William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “Evil as a hop, skip and a jump”
Taking apart the body that brought me here,
the fourth trip behind the moon,
where stars multiply in the dead of winter
for those looking for meaning and signs
from an indifferent astrologer,
mother remarked that when they knocked
on our door,
the young men were the most handsome of men,
blond,
polite, muscular and smiling.
little children were playing in the streets
a hop, skip, and a jump from God’s thumb nail.
and when the nice SS men finally came
to take me away,
I was hiding in the freezer with the sausage,
and the chicken,
and that corpse that brought me to the moon.
Alegria Imperial: “Plea for a Poem”
Alegria included this poem in a comment below a recent post here, and I thought it was so beautiful that I wanted to make a separate post out of it. Enjoy, and happy holidays to all.
Plea for a poem
write me a poem
words to breathe in
even if only whispers
as shouts have turned
the air into a
hail storm
write me some rain
my heart crackles
in the drought longing
for words drenched in
thought to sip
in the dark
i yearn for verses
snipped from flame tips
words that dance
the fire of fallen angels
saved from their march
on dying coals
write me a song
cadenced in sunsets
tympanis of words
rising off the hum
of meanings
drums have flattened
give me back
poems shredded spirits
birth in caves midnights
cleansed poems howling wolves
hankering for stars
divine
Book Notes: The Glass Violin
Australian poet P.S. Cottier truly does see the universe in a grain of sand–as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend’s garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound. Her new collection The Glass Violin (Ginninderra Press, 2008) contains all this and more.
One of the pleasures of reading poetry is finding that someone else has experienced and expressed a precise emotion that you thought was peculiar to you. When Cottier writes, in a poem titled “Forlorn”, “The abandonment of teabags is absolute,” I feel less silly about my pangs of guilt for turning those neat, dry, nearly immortal little packets into wet lumps of trash. Elsewhere, in “Cutting on Laminex”, she reflects on how the scratches on a cutting board outlast the meals prepared there, which segues into awareness of the marks that time has left on her: “I can’t recall the accidents, the sharp slice/which scarified, but skin scratches speak/of that open cut, some day, grave of mine.” She has kindly given me permission to reprint a poem from this book below.
Rock
I didn’t want this, not at all.
The rock rolled back,
groaning, rasping,
birthing brightness.
It was meant to
make them free.
But a single breath,
in and out,
a teasing pause,
then they crucified others;
those who walked outside
their straitened view of me.
Labyrinthine irony,
to fill the sarcophagus
in my name.
Those chaotic echoes
darkening on deafness,
I hear them still.
I’d asked them to put down stones
and not to pound down sinners.
To understand, or at least,
not to irrevocably judge.
But when they built their church
on rock, of rock,
flesh was pushed aside,
Golgotha glorified.
A mortar and pestle,
hope ground against granite.
Sometimes when I watch, I wish
that boulder had not budged.
When my flesh was tortured
and my mother’s tears fell,
I believed
it would erode
the rocks in human minds.
But I hadn’t counted on their
thoughts like drowning pebbles,
sinking in a hard skull cave
just beneath the skin.
Love sealed within forever,
not knowing light.
The third day never comes.
Poems by Conway: “The Miracle” and Others
Advent is traditionally a time of quiet reflection and repentance, when we anticipate not only the birth of Christ but the Second Coming when God will bring justice and peace to the whole world. In America, where images of traditional families dominate the airwaves from Halloween until January, it can also be a sad time for those who are separated from their families by incarceration, war, abuse or estrangement. Advent gives us permission to mourn as well as rejoice, as in these new poems by my prison pen pal “Conway”, which he sent inside a beautiful Christmas card.
The Miracle
Drones!
Create unprecedented tones
conjure tracings of a murmur
(WHILE SITTING IN SOLITUDE)
Our breath turns into sounds
as again I start these movements
straining for
an accurate use of words…
While air drifts along
with its light, solitary steps
untouchable noise
dissolving the silence
into spelled words
manipulated,
These fixed, yet faded fingers
pointing at nothing
but gestured dreams
of an empty street
a diffused vacant voice
more fragile; Than
Threads of Glass
Eluding a Hurricane…
This song, even now
flees from a distant tongue
obsolete,
in a stalled unforgiveness
unsung…
The only contact allowed here
are shadows crossing paths
stretching to know each other
They revel in the Sun’s light
off a wall, from left to right
indifferent to any bickering
speaking only their own language
a noiseless echo of everything
following, watching from behind
it belongs to man, bird and stone
unaffected by the wind even.
Strange, that no one thinks
to challenge that, that
belongs to no one, yet everyone
reaching for the horizon…
****
Everything is only for a day
Everything, is only for a day.
Both that which Remembers, and that
which is remembered.
As we observe this Holy Day
in reference to one’s perception, for
this series is not a mere enumeration–
of disjointed things.
Time is like a river–
made up of events which happen
and a violent stream; for
as soon as a thing has been seen,
it is carried away too.
Altogether the interval is small.
Let the part of your soul
which leads and governs–
be undisturbed, by
The movements in the flesh.
We Remember our Dead.
When they were born, when
They passed.
Either as beings of promise
or;
Beings of Achievement…
“The Door Miser” and Other New Poems by Conway
My pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life under California’s “three-strikes” law for receiving stolen goods, has sent me an abundance of exciting new poems this month, some of which I share below. He has also been writing dark-humored stories about prison life, which I have encouraged him to submit to the PEN Prison Writers contest. If my readers know of other publication opportunities for incarcerated writers, please leave me a comment below.
The Door Miser
Sleeping ice
walked the pregnant rain
with mud.
Lighting barbed steeples
dragged shattered guitar strings
while a Horn bled my breath…
Clay eyes, blunt lips
growling voices
that died
howling like the wind
in search of Ozone…
Chase this dim-witted drunkenness
overcome by the ages
locked inside an hourglass
when a spider webs knots
yanked the darkness out
from under freeform footsteps…
Breaking down again
in the voice of bruises.
But they never belched
like: an Orphans sin
in the way-layed wilderness
or a maniac on the freeway
speeding through stopped traffic
at Rush hour…
This interminable Toilet of
a sacred food stop
right between you and I
inside this Homeless broken sky, or
doomed door of denial…
Glass days visions
just offer an Iron failure
while tears lonely language
can only desire
the world…
Think hard about testing
a terrified dictation.
Arresting these wheels
for too many years
as even the moon
considers my prison
while shivering…
When the Door miser
crawls up my spine
again, to suck on
my nerves…
****
Poker After Dark
The Blood & Tears of life
fell, into the ashes burned
when remains of my father
were turned to mud in a day
fell, into the ashes burned
when remains of my father
were turned to mud in a day
Kabashed his world into an ashtray
then washed that mother fucker away
lost, corroding through the pain
bereft and rusting in the rain
on the wrong side of right
from six feet under this grass
left to wonderful blunders
while sucked inside a riptide
the absence of fear
in here, does not prove courage
or discourage the deer
caught in the headlights
when a deck is shuffled
those cards are dealt, but
it’s how you play the cut
or gamble on, a “Supposed” losing hand…
****
Gag Order
How do I make my tongue tell it?
Choking in this bitter dungeon
now, can you smell it?
Desperately desiring to describe
a moment to share
gagging like a dog in a fight
(mouth full of hair)
Boundaries eternal, are forced inward
further in strife
constricting our death
out of breath for life
Screaming the whispers
below this cold sweat
Spilling those empty jars of regret
saving that craving, of nothing
Forever…